Karl M a r x on the transition from feudalism to capitalism

CLAUDIO J. KATZ
Loyola University- Chicago

Studies of Marx's theory of history are complicated by the fact that

Marx himself never provided a systematic treatment of its central prin-
ciples. As a result, the task of elaborating historical materialism has
fallen to Marx's interpreters, who are required to distill its tenets from
Marx's historical writings and from general statements in which he
summarized his historical method. Within the last decade, this task has
attracted considerable scholarly attention occasioned by Cohen's suc-
cessful restoration of an orthodox version of Marx's theory that had
fallen into desuetude. On this reading, historical materialism is guided
by the thesis "that history is, fundamentally, the growth of human pro-
ductive power, and that forms of society (which are organized around
economic structures) rise and fall according as they enable and pro-
mote, or prevent and discourage, that growth"1

The most promising alternative to Cohen's interpretation is one that

awards causal primacy to class and class struggle. The best treatment of
this thesis is Brenner's historiography, where it guides his analysis of
the transition from feudalism to capitalism in early modern Europe. 2
Brenner replaces the logic of production with the logic of exploitation
at the center of his historical analysis. The relations of production and
the class struggles arising from them, and not the productive forces,
determine the internal composition and evolution of social formations
in history. Material progress is only a by-product of the course of devel-
opment of class struggle.

Cohen's defense of historical materialism did not neglect Marx's

emphasis on class. He sought to accommodate it, arguing that class
conflict serves to facilitate major historical change, while the deeper
cause of revolution lies in the autonomous tendency for the productive
forces to develop throughout history. "If we want to know why class

Theory andSociety 22: 363-389, 1993.

© 1993 KluwerAcademic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.
364

struggle effects this change rather than that," Cohen explains, "we must
turn to the dialectic of forces and relations of production which
governs class behaviour and is not explicable in terms of it, and which
determines what the long-term outcome of class struggle will be.''3 His
challenge to a version of Marx's theory that makes class struggle funda-
mental is to "explain, other than by reference to the disposition of clas-
ses to develop the productive forces, what makes successful classes
succeed.''4

Brenner does not offer a satisfactory answer to this problem. One of

the weaknesses of this study of the genesis of capitalism is its failure to
account for fundamental changes in the nature of class relations. My
intention in this article is to show that Marx's own text provides a
response to Cohen's challenge. Specifically, ! argue that Marx's analysis
of the rise of capitalism in England, presented in his mature works,
contains a conception of the inherent logic of class conflict that
explains epochal change quite independently of the character of the
forces of production. Marx's study of the transition from feudalism to
capitalism in England was the wellspring of his theory of epochal
change; it has also provided the crucial empirical test of its conceptual
innovations and controversial claims. 5 The interpretation of Marx's
theory offered below poses questions for the investigation of other
transitions; whether and to what extent this interpretation is general-
izable awaits further study. 6

The argument of this article moves back and forth between two levels
of analysis. The first level is that of Marx's mature historical studies.
There exists a widely recognized disjuncture in Marx's writings
between his ascription of the basic cause of historical change to, on the
one hand, technological progress and, on the other, class struggle]
Marx's earlier works, notably the German Ideology, provide an account
of human history that awards primacy to material progress. When
generalizing about history, Marx typically defends the technological
thesis. In his later writings, particularly in the Grundrisse and Capital,
Marx's practice as a historian awards primacy to classes. Marx did not,
however, spell out the logic of the historical explanations at work in
these texts. My aim, then, is to lay bare and explicate the causal prin-
ciples shaping Marx's own historical judgements. The result of this
study is a "reconstruction" of Marx's theory of epochal change that
seeks to correct several misunderstandings of its central claims.S
 365

The second level of analysis is that of the recent historical literature on

the transition from feudalism to capitalism in England. Specifically, my
focus is on the role played by the peasants in this transition. Some of
the most fruitful studies in recent historiography address the peas-
antry's contribution to the supersession of feudalism by capitalism.
Marx's own texts assign peasant class struggles a critical progressive
role, although this emphasis in his account has been generally neglect-
ed. There were of course limits to Marx's knowledge of pre-capitalist
economic history, both in the depth of contemporary scholarship and
in the extent of his attention to pre-capitalist history? Accordingly, my
aim is to assess the historical adequacy of Marx's account in light of the
research of modern economic historians. Conversely, I examine wheth-
er Marx's historical studies shed light on the conclusions these histo-
rians have reached. Underlying this method is the conviction that con-
ceptual clarifications of Marx's texts "will only produce real knowledge
if they derive from and return to controllable historical research" l0

This article is divided into four sections. The first places the controver-
sy about Marx's theory of history in the context of his account of the
rise of English capitalism. The second examines Marx's conception of
the feudal dynamic and its characteristic crisis complex. This section
argues that Marx's understanding of the fundamental contradiction
precipitating the dissolution of a social formation is sharply at odds
with that which Cohen attributes to him. The third section reconstructs
Marx's analysis of the class conflicts resulting in a qualitative social
transformation. This section shows that Marx's text provides an explana-
tion for why successful classes succeed (and fail) that relies solely on the
internal dynamic of class conflict. The concluding section formulates
the logic of epochal change that emerges from Marx's historical study.

The primitive accumulation of capital

For Marx, capitalism is quintessentially a class system distinguished by

the specific economic form in which unpaid surplus labor is appro-
priated from the direct producers. The accumulation of socially pro-
duced wealth as capital therefore presupposes the prior establishment
of capitalist class relations. Accordingly, Marx's study of the genesis of
capitalist production provides an analysis of the process that broke up
feudal class relations, giving rise to a capitalist class enjoying private
ownership of the means of production facing a working class owning
nothing but their labor power.
366

Marx's explanation of the transition from feudalism to capitalism delin-

eates an intervening period, neither feudal nor capitalist, characterized
by the prevalence of independent peasant cultivators. "In England," he
writes, "serfdom had practically disappeared in the last part of the 14th
century. The immense majority of the population consisted then, and to
a still larger extent, in the fifteenth century, of free peasant proprietors,
whatever was the feudal title under which their right of property was
hidden. ''11 The emancipation of the English peasantry released the
material base of the feudal mode of production, the village economy,
from the prerogatives of lordship, allowing it to develop according to its
own internal propensities. 12 The preconditions of capitalist accumula-
tion, Marx argues, were established by this economy of relatively unfet-
tered commodity production? 3

Two decisive events, Marx contends, marked the genesis of capitalism.

The first comprised the abolition of all types of personal dependence -
that is, of serfdom. The emancipation of the ordinary producer fulfilled
an essential prerequisite of capitalist exploitation: If the individual is to
sell his labor power as a commodity, explains Marx, "he must have it at
his disposal, must be the untrammelled owner of his capacity for
labour, i.e., of his person." 14 Since the direct producers retained control
over their means of production, however, fulfillment of this condition
alone ensured that they were required to exchange only the products of
their labor, not their labor power itself. Consequently, the second
essential prerequisite of capitalist production is "that the labourer,
instead of being in the position to sell commodities in which his labour
is incorporated, must be obliged to offer for sale as a commodity that
very labour-power, which exists only in his living self" 15The realization
of this second condition is the "original sin" of capital, its "so-caUed
primitive accumulation"16 "The expropriation of the agricultural pro-
ducer, of the peasant, from the soil is the basis of the whole process." 17

Cohen maintains that Marx's explanation of the advent of capitalism

accords in its essentials with the technological reading of history? 8 On
this reading, capitalist class relations emerged when and because they
were best suited to promote, and therefore necessary for, optimal pro-
ductive development. The focus of Cohen's interpretation is Part VIII
of Volume 1 of Capital. He confines his discussion exclusively to
Marx's account of the change from petty proprietorship to capitalism,
omitting a discussion of the change from serfdom to widespread small
holding. To be sure, as Cohen points out, Marx's narrative of the for-
mation of capitalist class relations begins with the economy of small
 367

agrarian producers. But Marx does not, as Cohen claims he does,

explain the internal dynamic and dissolution of this economy in terms
of the development of productive capacities it was incompetent to real-
ize. Quite the contrary, Marx explains the transition from petty pro-
prietorship to capitalist private property by referring it back to the
transition from serfdom to widespread small holding. "The economic
structure of capitalistic society," he writes, "has grown out of the eco-
nomic structure of feudal society. The dissolution of the latter set free
the elements of the former." 19

Marx examines the resolution of feudal class struggle in Volume 3 of

Capital. 2° Viewed from the perspective of Volume 3, an interpretation
of Part VIII of Volume 1 emerges that belies Cohen's reading of it. On
this interpretation, the advent of capitalist class relations was the un-
intended by-product of feudal processes of class struggle. This is the
thesis that guides Brenner's studies of early modern Europe. He argues,
and claims that Marx argues, that the abolition of serfdom was the
result of successful peasant-class struggle against feudal lordship. By
the fifteenth century, peasant communities in England had effectively
put an end to the lords' capacity to extract an economic surplus in the
form of feudal rents. Unable to maintain or reinstate the institution of
serfdom, the landlords responded to their predicament by abandoning
customary in favor of economic rents on their lands, in effect carrying
out "the so-called primitive accumulation" by stripping the peasants of
the traditional guarantees to their holdings, reducing them to commer-
cial tenants or agricultural wage laborers. The result was the distinctive
development of agrarian capitalism in England, with its characteristic
three-tiered relation among a large landlord, typically an aristocrat, a
capitalist tenant farmer, who made the main economic contribution,
and dispossessed peasants now relegated to proletarian status.

The lacuna in this story lies in its failure to explain the shifting fortunes
of the contending classes. 21 Brenner argues that the English lords failed
to maintain or restore their traditional prerogatives in the face of fierce
peasant resistance at the close of the Middle Ages, and yet succeeded
in evicting the peasants from the soil in the early modern period. = He
admits, however, that he does not have a good answer to the question
why feudal class struggle in England produced this outcome. Indeed,
Brenner points out that the very strength of peasant communities
necessary to cripple the feudal regime would have precluded the expro-
priation of the cultivators from the land. In his view, however, small
peasant proprietorship is incapable of engendering economic develop-
368

ment. 23 Brenner concludes, rather cautiously, "that pre-capitalist econ-

omies have an internal logic and solidity which should not be under-
estimated," and "that capitalist development is perhaps an historically
more limited, surprising and peculiar phenomenon than is often appre-
ciated.''24

Why were peasant communities sufficiently cohesive to put an end to

serfdom but subsequently unable to retain control over their lands
against the aristocratic counter-offensive? The answer lies in an exami-
nation of the dynamics of class formation and disintegration within the
peasantry. Interpretations of Marx's historical assessment of the pre-
modern peasantry typically focus on its negative aspect: the peasants'
main contribution to the rise of capitalism was to get expropriated
from the land. 2s Brenner shares this perspective? 6 What has been gen-
erally missed is Marx's assessment of the peasantry's crucial role in
making a positive contribution to the transition from feudalism to capi-
talism. Indeed, Marx's historical analyses contradict widely received
accounts of them, accounts that have come to inform some of the cen-
tral tenets of the prevailing orthodoxy in peasant studies. 27 1 argue that
Marx's understanding of the course of peasant class struggles underly-
ing the transition from serfdom to widespread peasant proprietorship
provides the key to an explanation of the genesis of capitalism in terms
of the internal logic of class conflict.

The feudal crisis complex

Elster has argued that Marx offers no hint of a dynamic mechanism

internal to the feudal relations of production to explain their impact on
economic development or the evolution of feudal class relations.28 This
is surely an exaggeration. Outside of his analysis of capitalist produc-
tion, Marx's most significant and distinctive historical contribution has
been his conception of feudal class relations and their economic
impact. 29 This conception has proven remarkably fruitful in guiding
contemporary historical research of the feudal economy.

The distinguishing characteristic of the feudal relations of production

arises from the fact that the economy is effectively under peasant con-
trol. Unlike the slave or the modern wage-laborer, who work under
alien conditions of production, "the.direct producer.., is to be found
here in possession of his own means of production, the necessary ma-
terial labour conditions required for the realisation of his labour and
 369

the production of his means of subsistence "'3° Medieval peasant villag-

ers were quite capable of reproducing their economy without the inter-
vention of any ruling class. Surplus labor was therefore extracted from
them "by other than economic pressure" - that is, by juridical-political
means ultimately sanctioned by military force. Accordingly, the prop-
erty system took the form of "a direct relation of lordship and servi-
tude, so that the direct producer is not free.''31 The lord was empow-
ered to command the labor of the peasants by virtue of his superior
authority to make binding decisions regarding the disposition of their
persons and lands. This relationship specified the characteristic form of
labor power in the feudal mode of production - serfdom. The term is
plagued by controversy, but it is sufficient for our purposes to adopt
Marx's own definition: a "condition of personal dependence ... a lack
of personal freedom, no matter to what extent, and being tied to the
soil as its accessory, bondage in the true sense of the word.''32

The economic activities of lords and peasants were determined by the

need to reproduce their conditions of existence. The strategies they
adopted were a function of the prevailing mechanisms of surplus
extraction. Specifically, the lords were obliged to protect their power to
extract rents, both from rivals within their own class and from the peas-
ants. They were therefore required to use the lion's share of the surplus
they extracted to preserve and improve the existent means to extract
additional surplus. Although the lords did make limited productive
investments, participating in large land reclamation projects, their main
outlays were political - chiefly for war and largesse. 33 The reasons for
this pattern of investment are not difficult to discern: they were intend-
ed to buttress the extra-economic power that maintained their position
as lords. Their economic impact was equally clear: they failed to pro-
vide "any significant feedback in the form of investment which would
increase production "'34

Marx located the main impetus of medieval economic development

within the class of immediate producers. 3s The peasants organized
their own material life, providing for themselves with means of produc-
tion they possessed and worked on their own account. Within the harsh
constraints of the feudal regime, they were thus afforded an incentive to
increase the surplus at their disposal by raising the productive capacity
of the domestic economy. The success of peasant class struggle deter-
mined the amount of economic surplus retained by the household and
thus, writes Marx, "to what extent the direct producer shall be enabled
to improve his own condition "'36
370

Take it, for instance, that the enforced labour for the landlord originally
amounted to two days per week.These two days of enforced labour per week
are thereby fixed.... But the productivity of the remaining days of the week,
which are at the disposal of the direct producer himself, is a variable magni-
tude, which must develop in the course of his experience.... The possibilityis
here presented for definite economic development taking place. 37

The heavy plough and the improved harnessing techniques necessary to

draw it; the larger fields appropriate to the new ploughing techniques;
the two- and three-field system of crop rotation; cropping changes such
as the substitution of wheat for rye as the primary winter crop - these
striking innovations in medieval agricultural technology and land
management were pioneered by the peasantry. 3s Peasants also provid-
ed the supply of colonizers in the movement of land reclamation from
forest, waste, and marsh that represented the main feudal advance in
agricultural output. Feudalism's productive potential thus improved to
the extent that the balance of class forces tilted in favor of the peasants,
giving them a greater scope to determine the allocation of the society's
productive resources.

This account of the basic cause of feudal economic growth turns the
orthodox reading of Marx's theory upside down. In Cohen's interpreta-
tion, "the class which rules through a period, or emerges triumphant
from epochal conflict does so because it is best suited, most able and
disposed, to preside over the development of the productive forces at
the time. ''39 But in Marx's view, it is the class of subordinate producers,
the peasantry, that was primarily responsible for the material progress
witnessed in medieval Europe. On the whole, the lords did not either
directly or indirectly encourage it. Quite the contrary, their economic
strategies systematically impaired the optimal use and development of
the existing productive forces. 4°

The fundamental contradiction of the feudal relations of production

lay in the cleavage between the nobility's m o n o p o l y of political and
military power and the peasantry's role in organizing the economy.41
The lords' minimal entrepreneurial function meant that they could not
readily augment their incomes by increasing the economy's productive
capacity. As we have seen, they were obliged to use the surplus at their
disposal to maintain the military-political mechanisms that constituted
the foundation of their class power. Accordingly, their typical expendi-
tures ensured that they extracted from the village economy more
wealth than they restored to it in the form of productive investments.
 371

What was rational for the lords, given their position in the class struc-
ture, was ultimately irrational for the feudal economy as a whole.

The economic impact of feudal rents was primarily disruptive, and the
lords' distance from the economy afforded them little incentive to
gauge the effects of their levies on the peasant holdings. As Marx
noted, rents had to be treated as an obligatory prior expense that whol-
ly determined the share of the surplus retained by the village econ-
omy.42 Rents were inescapable and sometimes arbitrary; they could not
be adjusted to suit the tenants' changing circumstances. Rent increases
not only depressed the peasantry's economic situation but also dimin-
ished the funds necessary to reproduce feudalism's material base.
Feudal rent, wrote Marx, "may assume dimensions which seriously
imperil reproduction of the conditions of labour, the means of produc-
tion themselves, rendering the expansion of production more or less
impossible....,43

The impact of the lords' exactions on the limited productive potential

of the peasant economy signalled the end of feudal development. The
prevailing mechanisms of surplus extraction contained their own inter-
nal barrier, reached when they crippled the capacity of the peasant
economy to reproduce material life. Sometime during the opening
decades of the fourteenth century, the lords' exactions crossed the
limits of economic safety, producing a general exhaustion of the soil.
The result was a massive crisis which convulsed European society: the
medieval economy entered upon a precipitous decline, taking the form
of repeated harvest failures and demographic collapse. 44

The nature of the feudal crisis complex is plainly incompatible with the
account of crises given by orthodox historical materialism. In the
orthodox view, grounded in the thesis that there is an autonomous ten-
dency for the forces of production to develop, "it is possible to speak of
a contradiction between the forces and the relations of production, but
not between classes.''45 A contradiction obtains when a society's class
relations fetter the optimal use and development of its productive ca-
pacity, "when prospects opened by its productive forces are closed by
its productive relations. ''46 The collision between the developing forces
and the increasingly restrictive relations is ultimately resolved in favor
of the forces, by a qualitative change in the relations.

A class analysis of the dynamics of social crises, in contrast, locates

economic contradictions within the class system itself. Antagonistic
372

imperatives inherent in the mode of exploitation require members of

the dominant class to reproduce their class power by means of eco-
nomic strategies that at the same time cause their self-destruction.
Specifically, a contradiction obtains when the process of surplus
extraction undermines the base from which surplus is drawn. 4v What is
threatened (or fettered) is not the prospect of continued productive
development but the prospect of continued exploitation. The crisis in
the relationships between the contending classes occasions an econom-
ic paralysis. We have seen that the feudal crisis complex assumed the
form of a dramatic contraction of the productive forces within the pre-
vailing relations of production. The general feudal crisis provides no
evidence of a link between the level of productive development and the
rise of a new class system, such as would be required to show that capi-
talism emerged when and because it encouraged optimal productive
growth.48 Quite the contrary, endogenously caused changes in class
relations determined the possibilities for epochal historical change.

The peasant economy: Nursery school for capitalist tenants

The general feudal crisis unleashed a desperate rent struggle as lords

and peasants sought to protect their conditions of existence in the face
of a rapidly contracting economic base. Aristocratic attempts to restore
feudal controls over the cultivators were met by violent peasant resist-
ance organized village by village and built upon the long years of ex-
perience of conflict against the lords. 49 The crisis itself was the product
- unintended and unwanted - of structural imperatives inherent in the
feudal mode of exploitation. The resolution of the crisis, however, was
determined by the active intervention of the contending classes, in
which their different capacities for struggle were forced to the fore-
front. 50 Throughout Western Europe, the peasantry succeeded in loos-
ening the grip of aristocratic rule. The medieval peasants' talent for
organization and collective action is well known to historians. Western
Europe is particular was densely populated by an "old" peasantry. The
collective life of peasants was deeply rooted: they "had had many cen-
turies to evolve institutions, common practices and a consciousness of
their own interest "'5~ Not only were peasant villages older than the
ruling aristocracy, but given the tendency of noble families to die out
or to be replaced by conquest, peasant communities had a more con-
tinuous life and were more deeply entrenched. They thus devel-
oped the requisite solidarity and strength to resist aristocratic en-
croachments.
 373

The economic emancipation of the peasantry developed earliest and

furthest in England, where peasant class struggle irreparably crippled
the extra-economic mechanisms whereby the lords had extracted a sur-
plus from the village economy, s2 The direct producers destroyed their
dependent position, giving rise to an economy of relatively untram-
melled petty commodity production. Landlords experienced a pro-
nounced fall in income, reaching its nadir in the mid-fifteenth century.
Successful peasant resistance in the context of the acute labor shortage
occasioned by the demographic collapse forced landlords to wind up
their demesnes, leasing its lands chiefly to peasants, and to remove vir-
tually all feudal controls on peasant agriculture. Depopulation and the
peasants' liberty to move and to buy, sell, or let land contributed to a
dramatic increase in the volume of land transfers. The majority of peas-
ant families acquired sufficient land on which they could get a living by
their work; relatively fewer families depended on regular employment
for wages. Not only did the size of peasant holdings generally increase,
but cultivators made significant advances in obtaining more secure
tenures. The direct producers thus made substantial gains in their
material conditions of life. 53 "Only in the period of the decline and fall
of the feudal system," writes Marx, "but where it still struggles internal-
ly - as in England in the fourteenth and first half of the fifteenth centu-
ries - is there a golden age for labour in the process of becoming
emancipated. T M

The emergence of an economy of relatively free peasant proprietor-

ship, Marx contends, created the necessary preconditions for the gen-
esis of capitalist accumulation. 55 Marx's analysis sharply challenges
some of the central tenets of the current orthodoxy in peasant studies,
tenets often (mis)attributed to Marx's own works. Marx is typically por-
trayed as an implacable foe of the peasants, dismissing them as rural
barbarians irrationally hostile to capitalist development. Hence "peas-
ants were most interesting for Marx when they were ceasing to exist as
such," appearing in his writings as the object or fodder of history. 56 A
prevailing body of contemporary scholarship has endorsed the thesis
that peasant communities form an insuperable barrier to economic
modernization. In this view, peasant villages defend communal rights
against the consolidation of private property, and the small-scale and
self-sufficiency of peasant farming retards productive development. 57

Marx's actual judgments on the peasantry - less axiomatic, more histo-

rical - sought to trace the variable roles played by different forms of
peasant action in different historical contexts. Thus Marx draws a
374

sharp distinction between the p r e - m o d e r n and the m o d e r n peasantry.

In the context of a capitalist country such as nineteenth-century France,
he maintains, the continued p r e d o m i n a n c e of peasant ownership acts
as a major b r a k e on the economy, although even here Marx recom-
m e n d e d against any ritual excommunication of the peasantry as a reac-
tionary mass. 58 By contrast, Marx underscored the p r e - m o d e r n peas-
antry's contribution to the transition from feudalism to capitalism.

T h e thesis that the peasantry resisted capitalist farming as a funda-

mental threat to collective village rights telescopes long-term develop-
ments, neglecting crucial stages in the transition f r o m feudalism to
capitalism. M a r x draws a clear distinction between the private property
of small producers, founded u p o n their own labor, and capitalist pri-
vate property, resting u p o n the exploitation of the labor of others.
Capitalist property, he argues, is "not only.., the direct antithesis of the
former, but absolutely grows on its t o m b only.''59 Accordingly, M a r x
characterized the genesis of capitalism in the countries of Western
E u r o p e as a process whereby "one f o r m of private property is trans-
f o r m e d into another f o r m of private property. ''6°

M a r x attributes the origins of individual p r o p e r t y to the cottage econ-

omy of peasants and artisans that emerged f r o m the dissolution of feu-
dal lordship. Indeed, he contends that free peasant proprietorship was
principally responsible for the development of m o d e r n h u m a n beings.
T h e genesis of individualism is a special legacy of successful peasant
struggles and should not be exclusively attributed to the bourgeoisie:

The private property of the labourer in his means of production is the foun-
dation of petty industry, whether agricultural, manufacturing, or both; petty
industry, again, is an essential condition for the development of social pro-
duction and of the free individuality of the labourer himself. Of course, this
petty mode of production exists also under slavery,serfdom and other states
of dependence. But it flourishes, it lets loose its whole energy, it attains its
classical form, only where the labourer is the private owner of his own means
of labour set in action by himself: the peasant of the land which he cultivates,
the artisan of the tool which he handles as a virtuoso.6~

Because of the medieval peasantry's illiteracy and inarticulateness,

m o d e r n historians have had to piece "together the fundamentals of
peasant ideology f r o m fragmentary expressions of opinion, or from
demands m a d e from time to time, or f r o m formulations of accepted
custom. ''62 What we do know of the medieval peasants' culture suggests
that its "primary feature.., was a deeply rooted sense of family property
 375

rights in the peasant holding, and the various appurtenances which

made it a viable economic unit - such as claims for common pasture
and other customary usages. With this naturally went the conviction
that the family's right in the holding was hereditary. ''63 Economic in-
dependence and self-sufficiency were essential strains in this world-
view. In the aftermath of their striking success, especially after the
1380s, in crippling the manorial regime, the aspirations of English
peasants became part of a general cultural ideal: Hilton observes "that
the concept of the freeman, owing no obligation, not even deference, to
an overlord, is one the most important legacies of medieval peasants to
the modem world "'64

The view that peasant cultivation blocked economic innovation is chal-

lenged by Marx's own historical studies and by contemporary histo-
rians of agricultural development in Europe. Recent research has large-
ly undermined Postan's claim that the prosperity of the peasantry in the
fifteenth century coincided with a period of economic decline. 65 Equal-
ly questionable is Brenner's thesis that peasant cultivation is incapable
of providing an adequate foundation for productive development. 66
Marx's argument is that the triumph of the peasantry as a class led to
the economic florescence of peasant agriculture, creating the basis for a
revolution in agricultural production. 67 By the mid-fifteenth century,
the newly independent peasants were able to retain a major portion of
their surplus on their holdings and employ it more freely, unencum-
bered by disruptive feudal exactions. Enterprising cultivators intro-
duced a greater degree of economic rationality into their agricultural
practices, experimenting with new forms of land usage and cropping
patterns, and used the flexibility of their new circumstances to contri-
bute to the growing market. Improvements in agricultural buildings on
peasant holdings, widespread dissemination of animals throughout the
village, the shift in emphasis from arable cultivation to pasture, the
increasing pace of peasant enclosures, the development of rural indus-
try, and the rising tempo of retail trade at the village level - all point to
the growing dynamism of the peasant economy. 68 The prosperity of
England relative to France was already noted by contemporaries such
as Sir John Fortescue, whose De Laudibus Legum Angliae (1468-
1471) Marx refers to in Capital. 69

The growing prosperity of the peasant village was, however, only the
first consequence of its emancipation from feudal rule. The second,
already evident in the sixteenth century, was the growing differentiation
within its ranks. TM The peasantry's success in crippling the feudal
376

regime was its last act as a cohesive social class. The peasant commu-
nity had never been an idyll of cooperation. E c o n o m i c conflict, par-
ticularly between wealthier and p o o r e r peasants, was not uncommon.
To be sure, conflicts within the village were always sharply circum-
scribed by the conflict between the village and the lords. Against the
nobility, their c o m m o n antagonist, they maintained their unity; in other
respects, large and small holders were increasingly divided. 71 More-
over, the peasants' achievement in securing the conditions of free
tenure contributed to growing land transfers, disrupting the ancient
tenemental arrangements that had given peasant villages their internal
solidity and resilience. Thus, if their cohesion made successful struggle
against the lords possible, their very success against the lords destroyed
the rationale for concerted action, spelling the end of village solidarity.

These interrelated developments - the growing prosperity of the

peasant economy and the subsequent economic differentiation among
cultivators - formed the prelude to a revolution in agricultural class
relations. The more prosperous peasants, Marx writes,

gradually acquire the possibility of accumulating a certain amount of wealth

and themselves [become] transformed into future capitalists. The old self-
employed possessors of land themselvesthus give rise to a nursery school for
capitalist tenants, whose development is conditioned by the general develop-
ment of capitalist production beyond the bounds of the country-side. This
class shoots up very rapidly when particularly favourable circumstances
come to its aid, as in England in the 16th century, where the then progressive
depreciation of money enriched them under the customary long leases at the
expense of the landlords.72

But if the peasants' cottage economy provided the nursery school of

capitalist farmers, it was simultaneously the death bed of the peasantry
as a class. The vital social element in these developments was the yeo-
manry, a group of substantial holders shading off toward the p o o r e r
husbandmen below and the lesser gentry above them. 73 They had both
sufficient resources and the will to break away from inherited agricul-
tural routines and introduce new ways of organizing the land. T h e yeo-
men were the initial force behind the enclosures. They amalgamated
scattered land parcels by appropriating, very often illegally, lapsed
holdings, by nibbling away at wastes, commons, and not infrequently
neighboring fields, including those of inattentive lords. These well-to-
do cultivators especially were released from the imperative to preserve
village unity to press the struggle against the lords once the feudal
regime was wrecked beyond repair. "Rich peasant families," writes
 377

Hilton, "now graziers and demesne farmers holding largely by lease-

hold tenure, no longer stood as mediators between the lords and the
communities of customary tenants. They were no longer potential
leaders in the resistance. TM

The genesis of capitalist class relations

The processes of peasant class formation and disintegration created

the conditions under which the primitive accumulation of capital be-
came both necessary and possible. English lords were obliged to search
for new methods of organizing land and labor to recoup their incomes
because the previous mode of exploitation had virtually collapsed. The
option of appropriating an economic surplus by reasserting feudal con-
trols over the peasantry was closed off to them. There was no question
of restoring the dependent status of the peasantry; villeinage had melt-
ed away. But if the landowners were required to devise wholly new eco-
nomic strategies, the concomitant emancipation and dissolution of the
peasant community made available a promising alternative. First, the
peasants' impaired capacity for class struggle facilitated their eviction
from the soil. Hilton explains:

English peasant communities in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries had

been capable of great resistance, even successful resistance, to attacks on
their conditions by the landlords. If they allowed themselves to be evicted in
the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries it was because economic and social
changes had destroyed the cohesion that had been their strength in the
past. 75

Second, the dynamism engendered by the economy of petty commod-

ity production showed the lords the profits that adoption of the new
methods of farming could bring, and provided them with both the
material means and the agents to reorganize agricultural production.
The greater landowners supplied the land on which the husbandry
practices pioneered by the yeomanry could be introduced on a larger
scale; and the process of economic differentiation within the ranks of
the peasants supplied the lords with tenants capable of efficient farm
management. Most farmers employed wage labor. The elements thus
set free by the dissolution of feudal society recomposed themselves in
the form of an emerging symbiotic relationship between aristocratic
landlords and capitalist tenants, providing the nucleus of the nascent
ruling class.
378

The logic of the new class system required the members of the domi-
nant class to adopt strategies for optimizing surplus appropriation that
consisted primarily in productive investments. On the one hand, the
market in tenants created by the introduction of purely commercial
relationships between landlords and farmers produced a situation in
which all but the most efficient farmers went under. On the other hand,
competition among landlords for tenants ensured that they could not
simply "squeeze" the farmers, threatening the funds available for im-
provement and hindering progressive husbandry. The resulting pattern
of investment allowed England to overcome the "crises of subsistence"
which plagued pre-capitalist economies.76

The agricultural revolution and the differentiation of the rural produc-

ers encouraged the "proto-industrialization" of the countryside, led by
the development of textile manufacturing.77 Increasing rural productiv-
ity made possible a steady transfer of productive resources from agri-
culture to industry. Merchant capitalists seeking to escape the confines
of the urban guilds found in the countryside a ready source of under-
employed labor in peasants with little or no land. For their part, small
cottagers whose domestic crafts had always provided a subsidiary
source of income found in outwork for the merchant a last refuge
against utter proletarianization.

The changing configuration of ownership relations in the countryside

transformed the economic and political physiognomy of the English
aristocracy. This is not to say that the transition to capitalism occa-
sioned any major redistribution of land from one class to another. But
if the land did not change hands, the t e r m s on which individuals held it
were fundamentally altered: the eighteenth-century Whig oligarchy - in
the main, the descendants of England's natural rulers in the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries - was no longer a class of feudal lords but
rather of capitalist landowners. 7s The landed aristocracy did not, to be
sure, make the transition to capitalist farming all at once; nor did all of
them succeed in adapting to the new social configuration. Aristocrats
who insisted on maintaining traditional levels of conspicuous con-
sumption were usually forced to sell their lands or to seek royal favor to
do so; many ended in ruin. The majority, however, managed to balance
their budgets, then took to rigorous exploitation of what was left in the
new manner, thus recovering their fortunes.

The process of consolidating the new economic order required the

ascending class to complete the destruction of the traditional regime,
 379

anchored in the institution of the Crown. Clearly, if private property

was to do the whole task of allocating labor power and its product,
then all productive resources, including labor power, had to be com-
pelled to assume the new property form. Accordingly, the trans-
formation of the ruling class manifested itself in a struggle to secure
the dominance of a wholly new form of property in the means of
production.

This is the economic meaning of the English Civil War: its special
accomplishment was to replace the political and juridical conditions of
feudal exploitation with conditions facilitating capitalist exploitation.
Parliamentary leaders converted all lands that were formerly held of
the king by feudal tenure into absolute ownership. Feudal rights, how-
ever, were abolished upwards only, not downwards: "the landed pro-
prietors," Marx writes, "abolished the feudal tenure of land, i.e., they
got rid of all its obligations to the state, 'indemnified' the State by taxes
on the peasantry and the rest of the mass of the people, [and] vindicat-
ed for themselves the rights of modern private property in estates to
which they had only a feudal title.''79 Both King and Parliament had fit-
fully sought to stem enclosures prior to the Civil War. Enclosure had
been pushed forward mainly by "individual acts of violence against
which legislation, for a hundred and fifty years, fought in vain.''8° After
1660, no government seriously attempted to check them. Whatever
was restored at the Restoration, it is surely significant that feudal ten-
ures and restrainst upon the enclosure of land were not. 81 Enclosures
were now arranged by the government itself. The peasantry lost all
attempts to secure property rights in holdings "to which [they] had the
same feudal right as the lord.''82 By the eighteenth century, the enclo-
sure movement in England experienced a veritable boom, reaching its
climax during the Napoleonic Wars. "The rise of a landless proletariat
was a long-drawn-out process," comments Hill, "but henceforth it was
an inevitable one.''83

The logic of epochal change

Cohen's challenge to a version of historical materialism that assigns

causal primacy to class struggle is to give an "answer to the question
why class wars (as opposed to battles) are settled one way rather than
another" without appealing to the development of the productive
forces34 Our reading of Marx's historical account of the genesis of
capitalist class relations in England suggests an answer to this question.
380

The transition from feudalism to capitalism was the outcome of two

qualitatively different types of class struggle. A n introduction to the
nature of this distinction and its implications for historical materialism
is provided by the opening paragraphs of the Communist Manifesto:

The history of all hitherto existingsociety is the history of class struggles.

Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and
journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposi-
tion to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open
fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary re-constitution of
society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.~

This catalogue of class conflicts curiously omits the struggle between

the aristocracy and the nascent capitalist class. The reason for this is
that there is a fundamental difference between the nature of the class
relationships characterized as "oppressor and oppressed" and the na-
ture of the conflict that gave rise to capitalist class relations. 86 On the
one hand, the antagonism distinguishing Marx's catalogue of class con-
flicts - for example, lord and serf - arises out of a nexus of exploitation
between an appropriating and a producing class. The contending
classes clash over the distribution of surplus produced by a given econ-
omy. On the other hand, the antagonism between the nobility and the
nascent capitalist class represents a struggle between irreconcilable
appropriating classes. The conflict here turns on the mode of exploita-
tion whereby surplus is appropriated. These two forms of class conflict
comprise very different ways in which the contending classes are de-
fined and in turn define themselves in relation to each other, pointing
toward widely divergent social outcomes. In Marx's terms, class con-
flict within a m o d e of production typically ends not in "a revolutionary
re-constitution of society at large," but rather "in the c o m m o n ruin of
the contending classes. ''~7 Only the clash between dominant classes
culminates in the rise of a wholly new society and economy.

Marx's study of the economy of small peasant producers is an account

of the period between the resolution of feudal class conflict and the
formation of capitalist class relations. Imperatives inherent in the class
relationship between lords and serfs provided a cogent explanation of
feudalism's characteristic evolution and internal contradiction. T h e
feudal crisis complex, we have seen, assumed the form of a substantial
contraction in the economic conditions of social existence of late
medieval Europe. No mechanism is in evidence linking the existing
level of material progress to the emergence of a new ruling class.
 381

Indeed, no class with the capacity and interest to revolutionize society

emerged from the internal dynamic of feudal class struggle or the struc-
tural interstices of feudal society The peasantry put an end to the lords'
capacity to reproduce themselves as lords; but peasant class struggle
proved quite inadequate to raise the peasantry to a position of domi-
nance. Needless to say, a capitalist class ultimately emerged from the
disintegration of feudal society. But this class emerged only after feu-
dalism had been long on the wane. ss The nascent capitalist class was
not called into existence by feudalism's internal dynamic; nor did its
ascendance occasion feudalism's decline. The feudal regime disinte-
grated from within: only its prior dissolution "set free the elements"
that came to form the capitalist regime.

The victory of the peasantry as a class encouraged a certain develop-

ment of the productive forces. This is not to say that the peasantry
emerged triumphant when and because it facilitated productive devel-
opment. Peasants had provided the main impetus of economic growth
throughout the medieval period; aristocratic rule systematically
blocked productive development. The success of peasant class struggle
following the general feudal crisis was a result of their superior capacity
for concerted action relative to that of the lords. Peasant communities
in Western Europe were older and more deeply entrenched than the
aristocracy, affording them the requisite solidarity and strength to resist
feudal encroachments.

The abolition of dependent cultivation revealed the limits of peasant

solidarity. This is one of the most significant conclusions yielded by
Marx's study of the transition from serfdom to small holding: there is
no necessary dynamic impelling the type of class struggle grounded in
the relationship of exploitation toward social revolution. Here is the
main reason why peasant communities, so successful in impairing the
feudal regime in the aftermath of the general crisis, were nevertheless
virtually incapable of resisting the expropriation of peasant cultivators
after the sixteenth century. Marx rightly claimed that individuals are led
and accustomed to organize as a class by the experience of common
conditions of exploitation. But, just as importantly, their collective
identity is circumscribed by the imperatives of class struggle, s9 Their
very success therefore spells the end of the need to act in concert and
the class begins to dissolve. If the English peasants constituted them-
selves as a successful class against the lords, their triumph made mani-
fest the limits of their cohesion as a class. The rationale for concerted
peasant action disappeared with the defeat of the aristocracy.
382

The emancipation of an exploited class, then, does not necessarily

entail the formation of a wholly new society. Rather, its emancipation
normally results in the dissolution of the contending classes. Far from
vitiating Marx's class analysis, this historical outcome argues for a more
tenable reconstruction of class and class struggle. For Marx argues that
class is a relationship in which individuals discover the identity of
their collective interests only in the process of engaging in struggles
against other individuals whose interests are antagonistic to theirs. 9°
This notion implies that when the nexus of exploitation is broken as a
result of the triumph of the oppressed class, the basis of class cohesion
withers and the class begins to fall apart.

The class conflict within a mode of exploitation contrasts sharply with

that characteristic of the clash between modes of exploitation. If peas-
ant class struggle was circumscribed by the need to destroy the feudal
regime, the emergent capitalist landowners replaced it with the regime
of private property, successfully reconstituting themselves as an alter-
native ruling class. The emancipation of the peasantry as a class made it
necessary for the lords to find new ways of extracting a surplus; the
subsequent disintegration of the peasantry made it possible. The class
identity of the individuals who came to form the new ruling class was
determined by their relationship to a wholly new type of property in
the means of production. If the capitalist landowners formed a subordi-
nate class within the waning ancien regime, it was in the sense that
feudal property arrangements militated against the consolidation of the
new property form. The aim and end of the contending classes, in
terms of which they came to define themselves as classes, had its source
in the interest of nascent capitalist landlords to complete the destruc-
tion of the ancien regime, and the social forces arrayed around the
monarchy to restore and preserve it. Consequently, increasing number
of landlords came to experience their oppression, however vaguely, not
in terms of the surplus extracted from them, but rather in terms of the
real possibility of constructing an alternative society.91

Capitalist class relations established a close if imperfect correlation

between the mode of surplus extraction and the requirements of ma-
terial progress. The triumph of capitalist production, however, was the
result of class struggles that occurred both prior to and quite independ-
ently of the development of the productive forces. The history of class
struggle explains both the surface relief of society and its long-term
patterns of economic development.
 383

Notes

1. G.A. Cohen, History, Labour, and Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1988), 3.
2. See in particular Robert Brenner, "Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Devel-
opment in Pre-Industrial Europe," and "The Agrarian Roots of European Capital-
ism," in The Brenner Debate, Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development
in Pre-lndustrial Europe, ed. T. H. Aston and C. H. E. Philpin (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1987). Compare Robert Brenner, "The Social Basis of
Economic Development," with G.A. Cohen, "Forces and Relations of Produc-
tion," both in Analytical Marxism, ed. John Roemer (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1986). See also Joshua Cohen, "Review of Karl Marx's Theory of His-
tory," TheYournal of Philosophy 5 (May 1982): 253-273, and G. A. Cohen,'s reply
in History, Labour, and Freedom, 85-106; John Roemer, Free to Lose (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1988), 108-124.
3. Cohen, History, Labour, and Freedom, 14. See also Roemer, Free to Lose, 114-16.
4. G. A. Cohen, "Reply to Four Critics," in Analyse &Kritik 5 (1983): 207.
5. See Richard Miller, Analyzing Marx (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984),
237; Alan Carling, "Liberty, Equality, Community," New Lefi Review 171 (Septem-
ber/October 1988): 95. Cohen maintains that the transition to capitalism provides
the best example of his defense of Marx's theory. G. A. Cohen, Karl Marx's Theory
of History: A Defenee (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), 169-170,
175-180.
6. Marx himself came to question the extent to which lessons drawn from the English
historical experience were generalizable. Compare Karl Marx, Capital, trans.
Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, ed. Frederick Engels, 3 vols. (Moscow: Pro-
gress Publishers, n.d.) 1:19 and 669-670, with Karl Marx, Letter to the Editorial
Board of Otechestvennye Zapiski, November 1877, in Late Marx and the Russian
Road, ed. Teodor Shanin (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983), 135-136. See
the discussions by Haruki Wada, "Marx and Revolutionary Russia," 48-49, 57-60,
and Derek Sayer and Philip Corrigan, "Late Marx: Continuity, Contradiction and
Learning," 77-80, both in Late Marx and the Russian Road, ed. Teodor Shanin.
7. Habermas provides an excellent discussion of Marx's oscillation between these two
principles of causality. Knowledge and Human Interests, trans. Jeremy Shapiro
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1971), 25-63. See also Brenner, "The Social Basis of Eco-
nomic Development," 40-47; Robert Brenner, "Bourgeois Revolution and Transi-
tion to Capitalism," in The First Modern Society, ed. A. L. Beier et al. (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1989), 272-95; Perry Anderson, In the Tracks of His-
torical Materialism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 33-35; Jon
Elster, Making Sense of Marx (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985),
238, 272, 284-285,318; Claudio J. Katz, From Feudalism to Capitalism: Marxian
Theories of Class Struggle and Social Change (Westport, Ct. Greenwood Press,
1989), 1-47. Attempts to reconcile these two versions of historical materialism,
typically by way of an appeal to a dialectical interplay between productive develop-
ment and class struggle, have been largely unsuccessful because two fundamentally
different explanations of historical change are being brought into play. This is a
logical and not a dialectical contradiction.
8. "Reconstruction," writes Habermas, "signifies taking a theory apart and putting it
back together again in a new form in order to attain more fully the goal it has set for
itself. This is the normal way ... of dealing with a theory that needs revision in many
384

respects but whose potential for stimulation has still not been exhausted." Commu-
nication and the Evolution of Society, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon
Press, 1979), 95.
9. E.J. Hobsbawm, Introduction to Karl Marx, Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations
(New York: International Publishers, 1964), 20-27.
10. Perry Anderson, Arguments Within English Marxism (London: NLB, 1980), 66.
Surely one of the most telling objections to Cohen's interpretation of Marx is that
its "distinctive ideas ... have not been put to work, to any significant extent, in any
reasonably successful detailed study of any major historical question by an inves-
tigator sympathetic to Marx." Miller, Analyzing Marx, 264. See also Rodney
Hilton, "Feudalism in Europe: Problems for Historical Materialists," in Class Con-
flict and the Crisis of Feudalism, ed. Rodney Hilton (London: NLB, 1990), 1-11.
11. Marx, Capital 1: 671; also pp. 672, 676.
12. Marx, Capital 3: 806. See also Capital 1: 316, n. 3; Karl Marx, Grundrisse, trans.
Martin Nicolaus (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1973), 510.
13. Marx, Capital 1: 694-695, 713; Capital 3: 798-800, 807.
14. Marx, Capital 1: 165.
15. Marx, Capital 1: 165.
16. Marx, Capital 1: 667.
17. Marx, Capital 1: 669. See also Marx, Grundrisse, 4 7 1 , 4 8 9 - 4 9 0 , 497-498, 5 0 5 -
514.
18. Cohen, KarlMarx's Theory of History, 175-180.
19. Marx, Capital 1: 668. See also Marx, Grundrisse, 506-509.
20. Marx, Capital 3: 796-802.
21. Among Brenner's critics, only William H. Hagen has noted this lacuna in his argu-
ment. See William H. Hagen, "Capitalism and the Countryside in Early Modern
Europe: Interpretations, Models, Debates," Agricultural History 1 (1988): 41-42.
22. Brenner, "The Agrarian Roots of European Capitalism," 291-296.
23. Brenner, "Social Basis of Economic Development," 49-52; "The Agrarian Roots
of European Capitalism," 306-311.
24. Brenner, "Social Basis of Economic Development," 53.
25. See, e.g., Michael Duggett, "Marx on Peasants," The Journal of Peasant Studies 2
(January 1975): 159-182; Alan Macfarlane, The Origins of English Individualism
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 37-44; David Mitrany, Marx
Against the Peasant (New York: Collier Books, 1961), 31-75. For a more balanced
reading, see Hal Draper, Karl Marx's Theory of Revolution, 4 vols. (New York:
Monthly Review Press, 1977-90) 2: 317-452. Teodor Shanin subscribes to the
prevailing view that Marx's Grundrisse and Capital treat the peasantry as fodder for
history. He argues, however, that Marx came to abandon this conception in the last
decade of his life when he turned his attention to Russia and the Russian peasant
commune. See Teodor Shanin, "Late Marx: Gods and Craftsmen," in Late Marx
and the Russian Road, ed. Shanin, 3-39. The argument of this article suggests that
no sharp break occurred between Marx's "mature" and "later" years. As I argue
later in the article, his historical judgments typically sought to trace the variable
roles of peasants in different historical contexts. See also Claudio J. Katz, "Marx on
the Peasantry: Class in Itself or Class in Struggle?" The Review of Politics 54
(Winter 1992): 50-71. Sayer and Corrigan have stressed both the distinctiveness
and importance of the "later Marx" as well as the significant continuities in his
thinking between Capital and his last years. See Sayer and Corrigan, "Late Marx:
Continuity, Contradiction and Learning," 77-94.
 385

26. See the perceptive critiques by Patricia Croot and David Parker, "Agrarian Class
Structure and the Development of Capitalism: France and England Compared,"
79-90, and J. P. Cooper, "In Search of Agrarian Capitalism," 144-148, 188, both
in The Brenner Debate, ed. Aston and Philpin. See also Robert H. Bates, "Lessons
from History, or the Perfidy of English Exceptionalism and the Significance of His-
torical France," World Politics 40 (1988): 507-509. Peter Kriedte shares Brenner's
Marxian orientation, despite some disagreements, adhering to the view that the
agricultural revolution in England awaited the prior elimination of the peasantry.
Peter Kriedte, Peasants, Landlords and Merchant Capitalists (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1983), 23-24, 74-75. See also Hagen, "Capitalism and the
Countryside in Early Modern Europe," 17-18, 30.
27. For a critical review of this orthodoxy, see Bates, "Lessons From History,"
499-516.
28. Making Sense of Marx, 278.
29. Miller, Analyzing Marx, 198.
30. Marx, Capital3: 790.
31. Marx, Capital3: 790-791.
32. Marx, Capital3: 791.
33. Christopher Dyer, Standards of Living in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1989), 53-55, 89-91 (for a discussion of aristocratic
household expenditures, see ch. 3). See also M. M. Postan, The Medieval Economy
and Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 103; M. M. Postan
and John Hatcher, "Population and Class Relations in Feudal Society," in The
Brenner Debate, ed. Aston and Philpin, 77-78; R. H. Hilton, "A Crisis of Feudal-
ism" in The Brenner Debate, ed. Aston and Philpin, 130-131; Brenner, "The
Agrarian Roots of European Capitalism," 238-242; Perry Anderson, Lineages of
the Absolutist State (London: NLB, 1974), 31-32.
34. Hilton, "A Crisis of Feudalism," 131. See Brenner, "The Agrarian Roots of Euro-
pean Capitalism," 233.
35. Marx, Capital 3: 794-796. See also Perry Anderson, Passagesfrom Antiquity to
Feudalism (London: NLB, 1974), 185-188.
36. Marx, Capital 3: 793.
37. Marx, Capital 3: 794. To be sure, the peasantry's contribution to productive devel-
opment should not be overemphasized. Peasant production, Marx argued, imposed
its own limits on economic growth; Capital 3: 807-808, 810. Moreover, medieval
economic development as a whole involved expanding output, primarily by re-
claiming uncultivated land, rather than increasing productivity. See Anderson, Pas-
sages from Antiquity to Feudalism, 188-190; Postan, The Medieval Economy and
Society, 41-44.
38. Postan, The Medieval Economy and Society, 44-57.
39. Cohen, History, Labour and Freedom, 15.
40. Cohen's thesis that pre-capitalist class rule, despite the obstacles it posed to pro-
ductive development, was best suited to promote material progress given the level
of material development at the time, is widely contradicted by economic historians.
Contrast Cohen's defense of this thesis, in Karl Marx's Theory of History, 169-171
and History, Labour and Freedom, 103-105, with the conclusions of Postan, The
MedievalEconomy and Society, 41-44, 102-104; Hilton, "A Crisis of Feudalism,"
130-131; Brenner, "Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development," 31-
34, and "The Agrarian Roots of European Capitalism," 232-238; Dyer, Standards
of Living in the Later Middle Ages, 7.
386

41. Hilton, "A Crisis of Feudalism," 26-27.

42. Marx, Capital 3: 7 9 0 , 7 9 2 - 7 9 3 , 7 9 5 . Postan has estimated that the average propor-
tion of the gross output of the typical peasant's holding levied by feudal exactions in
England "was frequently near or above the 50 percent mark." Postan, The Medieval
Economy and Society, 125.
43. Marx, Capital 3: 796.
44. Postan, The Medieval Economy and Society, 57-72; Brenner, "The Agrarian Roots
of European Capitalism," 264-272; Hilton, "A Crisis of Feudalism," 121-122,
128, 131-132; Rodney Hilton, "Was There a General Crisis of Feudalism?" in
Class Conflict and the Crisis of Feudalism, ed. Hilton, 166-172; Anderson, Pas-
sages From Antiquity to Feudalism, 197-204; David Levine, Reproducing Families
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 16-18, 24-25, 31-33. The death
toll was given a frightening impetus by the Black Death that swept Europe in mid-
century, but historians agree that the onset of the crisis predates the plague. Al-
though there is general agreements on the outward course of the crisis - ecological
imbalance giving way to demographic exhaustion - historians disagree on its inter-
nal causes. Postan assigns explanatory primacy to demographic patterns whereas
the Marxist historians (Brenner, Hilton, Anderson) award primacy to class rela-
tions. Levine's work is part of an attempt to reconcile Marxian and demographic
explanations of socioeconomic development. An assessment of the debate between
the demographic and the Marxian interpretations of feudal development, which
occupies a large part of The Brenner Debate, is outside the scope of this article.
45. Goran Therborn, Science, Class and Society (London: NLB, 1976), 396. See also
G. E. M. de Ste. Croix, The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek Work: From the
Archaic Age to the Arab Conquests (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell, 1981), 49-50.
46. Cohen, Karl Marx's Theory of History, 297. See also Cohen, History, Labour, and
Freedom, 109-123.
47. Compare with Marx's explanation of the capitalist dynamic that gives rise to a secu-
lar tendency for the rate of profit to fall. The imperatives of capitalist surplus
appropriation require capitalists to substitute living labor by dead labor (machin-
ery), narrowing the base from which surplus-value is appropriated; the imperatives
of feudal surplus appropriation require lords to wrest from the economy more sur-
plus than they return to it in the form of productive investments, eventually robbing
the soil of its fertility. Compare Capital 1:229 with 383-384.
48. For a discussion of the need to specify such a link between the level of development
of the productive forces and the rise of new relations of production, see Cohen,
History, Labour, and Freedom, 11-14, 17, and the exchange between Jon Elster
and G.A. Cohen in Theory and Society 11 (1982): 453-495. See also Brenner,
"The Social Basis of Economic Development," pp. 46-48, n. 13.
49. Rodney Hilton has provided an excellent analysis of late medieval peasant class
struggles in Bond Men Made Free (London: Methuen, 1973). See also Christopher
Dyer, Lords and Peasants in a Changing Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1980), 275-281.
50. See Anderson, Passages From Antiquity to Feudalism, 198, n. 3.
51. Hilton, Bond Men Made Free, 29. See also Brenner, "The Agrarian Roots of Euro-
pean Capitalism," 277-278.
52. Marx, Capital 1: 671,672, 694. On the erosion of the lords' coercive powers and
the consequent changes in landlords' and peasants' material circumstances in the
late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, see: Rodney Hilton, The Decline of Serfdom
in Medieval England, sec. ed. (London: Macmillan Press, 1983), 33-44; Dyer,
 387

Lords and Peasants in a Changing Society, 264-275, 287-297, 301-305; Dyer,

Standards of Living in the Later Middle Ages, 41-48, 141-143, 146-150, 1 5 8 -
160, 181-182; Postan, The Medieval Economy and Society, 105-109, 139-141,
151-154; Levine, Reproducing Families, 31-37; Anderson, Passages From Antiq-
uite to Feudalism, 204-209; Rodney Hilton, The English Peasantry in the Later
Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 39-40.
53. The other side of this outcome is the relative success of the medieval ruling class in
regrouping itself around the emerging absolutist state. Despite its gains in restoring
the authority of the Crown, the Tudor revolution failed to secure the essential
ingredients of absolutist power - money, bureaucracy, army. Thus, in contrast to its
English counterpart, the French peasantry secured the tenancy of their holdings
only within the framework of the absolutist state. The reimposition of "centralized
feudal rent" by the monarchy ensured that the kingdom remained "this side" of the
great transformation until the late eighteenth century. "The real crime of the
French monarchy," write Croot and Parker, "was not that it bolstered peasant
ownership but that (together with the church, seigneurs and landowners) it depres-
sed it so brutally. The consequence was that the countryside lost its most dynamic
force - a class of truly independent peasants." Croot and Parker, "France and Eng-
land Compared," 88-89.
54. Marx, Grundrisse, 510. "Golden Age" is also the term Postan uses to describe the
economic condition of the peasantry at the close of the Middle Ages. Postan, The
Medieval Economy and Society, 142. Levine describes this period as "the indian
summer of peasant society." Levine, Reproducing Families, 35.
55. A discussion of the role of this economy of small producers in the transition to
capitalism played a central part in the Dobb-Sweezy controversy of the 1950s. See
Maurice Dobb et al., The Transition From Feudalism to Capitalism, introduction by
Rodney Hilton (London: NLB, 1976).
56. Duggett, "Marx on Peasants," 161. See above, n. 25.
57. SeeBates, "Lessons from History," 500-510.
58. For an analysis of Marx's historical assessment of the French peasantry, see Katz,
"Marx on the Peasantry," 50-71.
59. Marx, Capital 1: 716. See also Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Manifesto of the
Communist Party in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, 50 vols.
projected (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1975-) 6 : 4 9 8 - 5 0 0 (hereafter cited as
CW).
60. Marx, "Reply to Vera Zasulich," 8 March 1881, in Late Marx and the Russian
Road, ed. Shanin, 124.
61. Marx, Capital 1: 713. See also Capital 1: 672; Capital 3: 807. In light of these pas-
sages, it is difficult to accredit Macfarlane's contention in Origins of English Indi-
vidualism, 39-43, 195-197, that, in Marx's view, modern individualism emerged in
opposition to the peasant economy.
62. Hilton, Bond Men Made Free, 38.
63. Hilton, Bond Men Made Free, 38 (see also p. 40). See M. M. Postan, "Medieval
Agrarian Society in Its Prime: England," in M. M. Postan, editor, The Cambridge
Economic History of Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), 1:
626; Levine, Reproducing Families, 26, 36-37.
64. Hilton, Bond Men Made Free, 235.
65. Compare Postan, The Medieval Economy and Society, 142, with Dyer, Lords and
Peasants in a Changing Society, 316,339.
66. See Croot and Parker, "France and England Compared," 79-90; Hilton, "A Crisis
388

of Feudalism," 133-134; Levine, Reproducing Families, 39-40, 44-49; Dyer,

Standards of Living in the Later Middle Ages, 143-145, 271-273,276-277; Bates,
"Lessons From History," 507-510; Jack Goldstone, "Regional Ecology and Agrar-
ian Development in England and France," Politics and Society 16 (September
1988): 301-302,306, 310- 316.
67. Marx, Capital 1: 67t-672, 713; Capital 3: 798-800, 806-807; Karl Marx, The
Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, CW 11: 189-190.
68. Dyer, Lords and Peasants in a Changing Society, 316-354.
69. Sir John Fortescue, De Laudibus Legum Angliae, ed. and trans. S.B. Chrimes
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1949), 67-71, 81-85, 87-89. See also
Marx, Capital 1: 672; Dyer, Standards of Living in the Later Middle Ages, 271-273.
70. Dyer, Lords and Peasants in a Changing Society, 310-315, 366-372; Levine,
Reproducing Families, 25-26, 38-55.
71. Hilton, Bond Men Made Free, 32-35; see also Hilton, The English Peasantry in the
Later Middle Ages, 51.
72. Marx, Capital 3: 799. See also Capital 1: 694-695.
73. In the view of Croot and Parker, "The most striking contrast between the agrarian
structures of [England and France] during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
[was] the lack of any equivalent in France to the celebrated class of English yeo-
manry, which was itself the product of a process of differentiation within the ranks
of the peasantry, a process not experienced by their French counterparts;" in
"France and England Compared," 85. See also Dyer, Lords and Peasants in a
Changing Society, 331-337, 368-370; Levine, Reproducing Families, 38-40;
Barrington Moore, Jr., Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1966), 11; Marx, Capital 1: 676.
74. Hilton, "A Crisis of Feudalism," 135.
75. Hilton, The English Peasantry in the Later Middle Ages, 173; see also "A Crisis of
Feudalism," 135.
76. See E. L. Jones, "Editor's Introduction," to Agriculture and Economic Growth in
England, i650--1815 (London: Methuen, 1967).
77. Marx, Grundrisse, 510; Capital 1: 697-701; Capital 3: 785-786. Levine provides
an excellent analysis of the nexus among rural proletarianization, the agricultural
revolution, the development of manufacturing in the countryside, and population
growth. See Levine, Reproducing Families, esp., 131-137. The notion of "proto-
industrialization" is the hallmark of Kriedte's explanation of the transition to capi-
talism, in Peasant, Landlords, and Merchant Capitalists.
78. This is the conclusion of Lawrence Stone and Jeanne C. Fawtier Stone, An Open
Elite? England 1540-1880 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984). See also Brenner's
interpretation of Lawrence Stone's The Crisis of the Aristocracy, in "Bourgeois
Revolution and Transition to Capitalism," 297-303; Christopher Hill, Reformation
to Industrial Revolution (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1969), 146-149; Philip
Corrigan and Derek Sayer, The Great Arch (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985),
72-77.
79. Marx, Capital 1: 676. See also Hill, Reformation to lndustrialRevolution, 146-147;
Corrigan and Sayer, The GreatArch, 82-83.
80. Marx, Capital 1: 677.
81. Lawrence Stone, The Causes of the English Revolution, 1529-1642 (New York:
Harper Torchbooks, 1972), 72.
82. Marx, Capital 1: 672.
83. Christopher Hill, The Century of Revolution, 1603-1714, second edition (New
York: W. W. Norton, 1980), 162.
 389

84. Cohen, History, Labour, and Freedom, 15.

85. Marx and Engles, CW6: 482.
86. See Anthony Giddens, The Class Structure of the Advanced Societies (London:
Hutchinson University Library, 1973), 85-86, 91-92; Elster, Making Sense of
Marx, 373.
87. For Marx, the "common ruin of the contending classes" referred to the disintegra-
tion of the Roman Empire. See Hal Draper, Karl Marx's Theory of Revolution 1:
466. Provided that appropriate consideration is given to the different circum-
stances of medieval Europe, this same conception provides an apt characterization
of the disintegration of feudal society.
88. See Marx, Capital 1: 669.
89. See Marx, The German Ideology, CW5: 76-77, 78, 80.
90. This definition of class is succinctly articulated by E.P. Thompson. See E.P.
Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth: Penguin
Books, 1963), 9-11, and "Eighteenth Century English Society: Class Struggle
Without Class?" Social History 3 (May 1978): 146-150.
91. Cf. Giddens, Class Structure of the Advanced Societies, 116. On the historical sig-
nificance of the changing cultural self-understanding of the early modern English
aristocracy, see Corrigan and Sayer, The GreatArch, 72-86.